"He keeps his eyes in a plastic bag": Kae Tempest Urban Ecologies, In Literature and science, 1922-2022: modernist and postmodernist perspectives

In Hold Your Own (2014) Kae Tempest creates a poetic collection centered around the character of Tiresias. The opening poem of the volume (Tiresias) relocates the blind prophet’s vicissitudes in twenty-first century London, where the suburbs are progressively turned into gentrified areas and the people are constantly staring into their phones, the only ‘vision' they are eager to accept. The following sections of the collection (Childhood, Womanhood, Manhood, Blind Profit) are structured as a diary where the harsh life experiences of a non-binary individual intermingle with Tiresias’ metamorphosis and exile. The two characters follow the same steps through suburban London: the schools where every non-conformity is suspect, the pubs and parties where bullying is the rule, the rubbish-infested clearings where the “miracle” of the two separated snakes still occurs. In the last section the two voices explicitly become coextensive; Tiresias warns humanity about an impending war while the poet narrates the post-traumatic stress disorder of a war veteran. Tiresias cannot profit from his vision; the people hearing “his incantations” only “think he’s rapping lyrics” (Party Time). Nonetheless these visions are offered to the reader, in the final attempt to reconnect the ancient bard and the ancient myth to a contemporary audience. These images suggest a tight relationship between individual and collective violence (The downside), they describe climate change as an impending apocalypse that nobody wants to see (Cruise Control), they project into a future when humanity will metamorphose into new beings more apt to the boiling waters, before being located behind museum windows, “A fossilised smartphone preserved behind glass” (And as We Followed Dinosaurs). In my article I will argue that Tempest’s poetical endeavour suggests an attempt to construct a visionary ecology, a reality where shapes and genres are constantly changing and where mind and body, nurture and culture cannot be separated. This ecocritical discourse is built around the key figure of Tiresias. While the ancient prophet shares some characteristics with T.S. Eliot’s rewriting of the same myth, it also alludes to William Blake’s political attack on mechanistic epistemology. To Blake’s affirmation that “every thing that lives, / Lives not alone. Nor for itself (The Book of Thel) Tempest replies that “All life is empathy” (Radical Empathy). From this perspective, the poet (who explicitly recognizes in Blake one of their sources) opens the field to a dual ecocritical stance. The first reconnects with the tradition of ‘green romanticism’ inaugurated by critics such as Jonathan Bate, enacting a deconstruction of enlightenment episteme and its dualisms. The second corresponds to a vibrating protest against late capitalism’s dissociation of sensibility, in an attempt to preserve “the humanism in posthumanism” (Soper, 2012).